Return of the
rocket men
Nasa is planning manned missions to Mars by the
2030s, and the moon will be a key stepping stone.
Three of the last surviving lunar astronauts from the
historic Apollo programme, Buzz Aldrin (left), Charlie
Duke and Harrison Schmitt, tell Bryan Appleyard
what it’s like to set foot on an alien world
16 • The Sunday Times Magazine
space tourists will have the honour of
actually setting foot on the moon.
All the Apollo astronauts seemed to
possess a unique purity, a saintly
purposefulness. Engineers, scientists and
pilots — often all three — they got on with
their supremely difficult job with matter-offact heroism. They have, as Tom Wolfe put
it, “the right stuff ”. But, among these
aristocrats, the walkers are royalty. Only they
have stood and worked on another world.
So, Buzz Aldrin, what did it feel like?
“Fighter pilots weren’t trained or wired
to feel. We had a job to do. I like to say we
had ice water in our veins.”
No fear, then?
“What was there to be afraid of ? We’d
trained for years and we knew what to do.
I’ll tell you what is scary — having a MiG
on your ass trying to shoot you down, like
when I was a fighter pilot in Korea.”
Aldrin was the second walker. He stepped
onto the lunar regolith (moon dirt) 19
minutes after Neil Armstrong on July 21,
1969. The world was watching.
“Everywhere I go in the world,” says
Aldrin, “someone tells me where they were
the night Neil and I walked on the moon.”
His fighter-pilot calm was not shared by
the flight controllers in Houston. Charlie
Duke, later a walker, was Capcom —
capsule communicator — on Apollo 11.
His is the voice you hear talking to the
astronauts, and he knows better than
anybody what a damn close-run thing
that mission was.
“When we started the descent on Apollo
11, the whole place just started falling apart.
Communications dropped out, we had to
reorientate the space craft, we had to change
antennae, the computer kept overloading.”
Then, most famously, Armstrong steered
away from the planned landing site — too
rocky — a move that left the lander with
just a few seconds of fuel by the time it
touched down. Finally, he announced:
“The Eagle has landed.” And Duke replied:
“You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue,
we’re breathing again.”
A little of the ice in Aldrin’s veins
seemed to melt when he first stepped
onto the surface.
“My first words when I stepped on the
moon were ‘magnificent desolation’.”
Charlie Duke is more lyrical and exact.
He looked back at Earth, 250,000 miles
away. “We could see up to the Arctic Circle
and down through Canada, the US and
Mexico. The colours were just incredible:
the crystal blue of the ocean, the brown of
the land, the white of the snow and that
jewel of Earth just suspended in the
blackness of space. The sun shines so
brightly, you don’t see any stars. The
blackness of space was very vivid to me.”
He adds that, thanks to the training,
“When I hit the surface, I felt right at home.”
Schmitt is a geologist and he spent much
of his time looking downward at the dust,
GOOD MOON RISING Apollo 11 on its way
and (left) launching on July 16, 1969
rocks and regolith of the Taurus-Littrow
Valley, but occasionally he looked up.
“When you begin to look around and you
see that you’re in this magnificent valley,
brilliantly illuminated by a sun that is
obviously brighter than any sun you can
imagine, and all against the black of a black
sky. The mountains themselves at 1,500 to
2,100 metres high on either side of us. It
was really quite something … And the Earth
is always in the same part of the sky. It really
is a fantastic visual experience.”
Clearly all the training in the world
cannot stop you being shocked by wonder.
But there were also smaller, unexpected
things about the journey. Schmitt was
surprised into what sounds suspiciously close
to fear as the Saturn V exploded into action.
“It was surprising to me just how much
vibration there was. There were these
five engines, each developing 1.5m lb of
thrust, and we got this low-frequency
vibration. You couldn’t read the gauges on
the instrument panel … That feeling gets
your attention.”
Aldrin was struck by the fineness of the
regolith dust.
“Like talcum powder. That’s why I took
one of the few photos on the moon of the
iconic boot print.”
The dust also got to Duke. He noticed,
back inside the lander, that when you
rubbed it between your fingers, it felt “oily,
like graphite”. He also said it smelt like
gunpowder. Other walkers have said the
same thing. But when transported back to
Earth, it seemed to lose this smell. So does
the moon smell? Well, it is possible the
regolith emitted an odour on contact with
rex; nasa
T
wo paying customers are
looking forward to a voyage
around the moon, scheduled
for next year. Their identities
are being kept secret, though
the ticket price is not — $80m. They will fly
SpaceX, the company formed by the
internet billionaire and Tesla car builder
Elon Musk. It may not happen — space is
hard — but, if it does, will it mean human
space exploration is back on the agenda?
Are we going back to Mars and the stars?
The surviving six moonwalkers hope so.
The last words spoken on the surface
of the moon were: “Engine start push.”
That was Eugene Cernan, the Apollo 17
commander, ordering the launch of the
lander Challenger from the Taurus-Littrow
Valley on December 14, 1972. He died in
January this year, aged 82, having never
seen another human go beyond low-Earth
orbit in the intervening 44 years.
Myths have been spun around those last
words. It has been widely reported that the
supercool Cernan actually said, “Let’s get
this mutha outta here,” a suitably legendary
payoff. But Harrison Schmitt, who had
walked with him on the surface, insists on
the more mundane version: “It’s not in the
transcript, let’s put it that way. We were on
voice-activated communications at that
time, so I’m afraid that was not said. I think
the last words on the moon were ‘engine
start push’ — and once you push that
button, you’re not on the moon any more.”
Between July 1969 and December 1972,
just 12 men walked on the moon. Nasa had
three more Apollo missions ready to go, but
popular excitement and political will had
evaporated. An ugly, accident-prone dump
truck that only went as far as low-Earth
orbit — the space shuttle — replaced the
gorgeous Saturn V rockets.
The memories of the 12 moonwalkers
were all that remained. I ask Schmitt if he
left anything behind.
“Well, a lot of geological equipment ...”
I meant anything personal.
“Almost entirely my memories.”
Charlie Duke, an Apollo 16 walker in
April 1972, did leave something personal
— a picture of his family. Would he like to
go back and get it?
“After more than 40 years of monthly
temperature variations between minus
275 degrees and 400 degrees Fahrenheit,
I think it will be all shrivelled up and
blackened by now.”
Of the six surviving walkers, three of
them — Buzz Aldrin, Duke and Schmitt
— are the stars of Starmus IV festival in
Norway in June. This is a spectacular
science-and-music event started by an
astrophysicist, Garik Israelian. Other
than the walkers, this one has Stephen
Hawking, Brian May, Peter Gabriel, Richard
Dawkins and more. But, let’s face it, the
walkers are the stars; there’s something
special about them: not even Elon Musk’s
“The sun shines so
brightly, you don’t see
any stars. The blackness
of space was very vivid
to me” Charlie Duke
the oxygen in the lander — so maybe yes,
the moon smells of gunpowder.
Aldrin spent 2¼ hours on the surface; 2030
Duke and Schmitt each spent more than 20
hours. Longer times on the surface — the
latter two did three shifts of about seven
hours each — meant exhaustion became
a problem. Nasa was cautious about this —
the walkers were ordered to pause every
time their pulse rate went over 140.
“I found walking quite an easy thing
to do,” says Schmitt. “I was used to
2020
cross-country skiing and I could use that
technique of toe-push and glide across the
surface, it took very little energy and I got
quite a good clip.”
Handling things, however, was hard work.
“The gloves really wore out your
forearms pretty quickly. It was like
squeezing a tennis ball.”
Sleeping baffles me. In my mind, you’d
have to have dangerously high levels of the 2010
right stuff to doze off in a tiny pressurised
can on the moon. They all tell me about the
alarmingly delicate skin of the lander when
unpressurised — “It had a beer-can feel to
it,” says Duke. When pressurised, it
becomes taut and hard — but still, it’s not
a very sedative thought that this paper-thin
sheet was the only thing between you and
the vacuum of space. Duke’s partner, John 2000
Young, had no problems on their first
night, but Duke did.
“Yeah it was a problem ... we had some
sleeping pills in our medical kit. They were
not knockout pills, they were just enough
to put your mind on idle, so I got about
four hours.”
The pre-moon biographies of all these
men clearly have right stuff in common, but
there are variations. Aldrin was an engineer 1990
and fighter pilot, as was Duke. Schmitt was
a geologist who had to undergo aircraft and
helicopter training to become an astronaut.
Aldrin was religious, a presbyterian. He
took a special kit with him and gave himself
communion. He did it without publicity as
the crew of Apollo 8 — which orbited the
moon, but did not land on it, in December
1969 — had got in trouble for reading from 1980
the Bible. Nasa did not want any religious
comments made by any of them.
It was to be post-moon that their right
stuff was tested, though. After years of
intense training followed by enormous
global publicity and the high-adrenaline
adventure of going further than any
humans had been before (or since), they
seemed to run into a wall of bafflement after
1970
the mission. Especially Aldrin.
“I struggled for a while. I decided to
return to the air force and I was the first
astronaut to do that, but they didn’t know
what to do with a guy who walked on the
moon, so I didn’t get the assignment I was
hoping for ... I floundered, struggled with
alcohol and depression and my family life
suffered and ended in divorce. It took me a
while to get my life back together and
1960
2031
Proposed manned flight to Mars as
part of Mars One, a project led by the Dutch
entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp. Other contenders
in the new space race include Nasa and the
PayPal founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX
2030
2020
2017: a space odyssey
june 18, 2016
Tim Peake returns after his
186-day mission as the first British
astronaut sent to the International
Space Station (ISS)
march 1, 2016
The astronaut Scott Kelly and the
cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko return to
Earth after their 340-day mission aboard
the ISS, the longest to date
2010
February 12, 2001
Nasa achieves the first landing
on an asteroid: 433 Eros
2000
november 20, 1998
The ISS — a permanent and habitable
artificial satellite — launches into space
February 14, 1990
The Nasa space probe Voyager 1 takes
the first photograph of the whole solar
system, titled Family Portrait
July 20, 1976
Nasa’s Viking lander delivers the
first photographs and soil samples
from the surface of Mars
1990
1980
december 11, 1972
The Apollo 17 lunar module touches
down on the moon. It was the last
of Nasa’s six manned landings during
a 3½-year period that began
in July 1969 with Apollo 11
1970
April 12, 1961
The Russian cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin becomes the first human
to journey to outer space
1960
The Sunday Times Magazine • 17
“We became risk
averse after the shuttle
astronauts. Humanity
needs to explore, like we
did in 1969” Buzz Aldrin
18 • The Sunday Times Magazine
flight fantastic SpaceX’s Dragon 2 will
carry a new generation of lunar explorers
disappointing. But that was a political
decision. And then, while we were on the
moon, Congress approved the space shuttle
programme. Well, that put us back into
Earth orbit for the next 30 years.”
“When the Apollo missions ended,” says
Aldrin, “we all felt that Mars was the next
step. I wasn’t disappointed that we hadn’t
been back to the moon because we needed
to go beyond the moon. In 1985, I was
working [on] cycling orbits between the
Earth and the moon for tourism, but Nasa
wasn’t interested because we already knew
how to go to the moon.”
Spacecraft that move in “cycling orbits”
travel in continuous trajectories around the
moon (or Mars) and Earth. These would be a
much cheaper method of transport.
“There were a lot of mistakes that were
made. We became risk-averse after the
shuttle astronauts. Bureaucracy makes
things move slower. We cancelled the
shuttle programme even though we didn’t
have a rocket ready [for manned launches
into Earth orbit] and now we’ve been relying
on the Russians to get our astronauts up to
our $100bn space station.”
Duke is similarly distressed by the
reliance on Russia: “I think there’s
something fundamentally wrong with that.”
“I was, in retrospect,” says Schmitt,
“certainly disappointed that the political
issues of the time did not convince the
leadership of the United States that we
should continue to produce the Saturn V
rocket and use it on a regular basis, not only
to explore the moon, but to build space
stations and then ultimately to go on to
Mars. There could have been an
enhancement of that very, very robust
Saturn V technology. History will look at
that a little bit askance, but it’s the way it
turned out to be.”
The upside to cancelling the programme
is that it preserved the moonwalkers’
unique aura. In the absence of real space
exploration, they became the apostles of
space, advocates of exploration. “I consider
myself a global space statesman,” says
Aldrin. “Humanity needs to explore, to
push beyond current limits, just like we
did in 1969.”
Finally, in old age, their advocacy seems
to be working. Nasa has plans to go back to
the moon and then to Mars. The Trump
administration seems to be backing this.
The president recently signed a bill
authorising $19.5bn for Nasa. This means
space funding will not be cut and Nasa will
be able to continue with its launch system
and Orion capsule programme, which
aims to land humans on Mars by the 2030s.
On top of that there is a new wave of private
spacefaring — like Elon Musk’s voyage
around the moon and then, he says, Mars.
Aldrin has other ideas. Things are looking
up for the old walkers. Its just what Aldrin
wants — Earth orbit for the private sector,
deep space for the public.
“We have to rely on the private sector
to get to Earth orbit. Nasa should be
focused instead on deep-space exploration
… My cycler is the best transportation
system to bring humans and cargo to Mars.
But we can’t ignore the moon. It’s an
important stepping stone for Mars. We, the
USA, have to lead the rest of the nations of
the world to build an international base on
the moon to mine the ice. That ice can be
turned into rocket fuel … From there we
will learn how to live on another planet,
along with all the things we need to do to
enable missions to Mars.”
Politics ensured that the Apollo moon
landings were the start of nothing — no
space tourism, no voyages to Mars and
beyond. Instead, they joined Woodstock,
the Beatles, hippies and Muhammad Ali as
something strange and astounding that
happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. They
have become exotic, almost unbelievable
memories. The surviving walkers still
dream their dreams of space adventures,
and of a time when the world agreed it was
all worthwhile, and when men with the right
stuff could say they had seen and done things
nobody had ever seen or done before n
The Starmus IV festival runs June 18-23 in
Trondheim, Norway. Tickets at starmus.com
Want to meet the
moonwalkers in person?
We are giving away a pair of tickets (worth £850
each) to the Starmus IV space festival in Norway,
from June 18-23. The prize includes flights
and accommodation at the Clarion Hotel in
Trondheim. You and a friend will watch Buzz
Aldrin, Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmitt speak
and meet them afterwards. You will also receive a
complimentary copy of the book Starmus: Beyond
the Horizon, signed by the trio. The competition
closes at midnight on Tuesday, April 11.
For terms and conditions, and to enter the
competition, visit thesundaytimes.co.uk/starmus
Competition closes at midnight on Tuesday April 11. Open to United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland residents aged 18 or over only. One entry per person. Winners will be selected at random from all correct entries
within seven days. No cash alternative to prize in whole or in part. Prize is non-transferable. the Promoter is Times Newspapers Ltd. Not open to staff of the Promoter and promotional partner or their families
focus on my passion — space. Now, at the
age of 87, things are better than ever!”
Duke, at first, had similar problems.
“The question of what are you going to
do now came up almost immediately after
Apollo. I was offered a job in Washington
by Nasa, to be a deputy administrator, but
my marriage was such a problem at that
stage, and I knew it would end if we went
to Washington.”
He was restive, frustrated.
“I had this problem that I couldn’t find
any peace. I should be satisfied, I’m one of
the 12 guys who walked on the moon.
Through all this, things were getting worse.
My wife, Dorothy, by 1975 she was on the
verge of suicide … Looking back, that lifestyle
we had during Apollo — it just stopped;
that leads to problems for a lot of folks.”
He thought money might be the answer.
He had rich friends and they seemed to be
OK. He made money in business for a
couple of years, but that didn’t provide the
calmative he sought. Finally, both he and
his wife found peace in the faith of the
Episcopal (Anglican) Church.
Schmitt seems to have had the strongest
dose of post-moon right stuff, perhaps
because he had gone there as a scientist
and that provided him with a role when
he came back.
“I didn’t have the problems some of the
guys may have had because I was
immediately trying to understand the
science of these samples. I always had an
interest in politics, so I started thinking
about running for the US Senate, which
I did in 1976.” He was a Republican senator
for New Mexico between 1977 and 1983.
But there was one disaster they all —
even Schmitt — had to deal with. Apollo 17
marked the end of the programme and the
consignment of all that wonderful, beautiful
engineering to museums. This was, like
many collisions between politics and
wonder, madness. The Saturn V technology
had years of life left in it.
The cancellation was partly political —
Congress and the Nixon administration
had imposed tighter budgets and Nasa’s
workforce was being forced to shrink —
down from 400,000 in the mid-1960s to
190,000 in 1970. But also, Nasa was not sure
that further moon missions represented
value for money and there were competing
programmes — a space station and the
space shuttle.
“Nasa had three Apollo vehicles that
were ready to fly,” says Duke, “and they
cancelled those missions, which was very